Brent K Jesiek

• Ph.D.
• Professor at Purdue University West Lafayette

This paper examines the history of electrical engineering education, leveraging the concept of “expansive (dis)integration” to frame a number of key trends and challenges in the field. The paper is organized historically, starting with the origins and early development of electrical engineering education beginning in the late 1800s, and then tracin...

Although engineering education has played important roles in China's growing power and influence on the world stage, engineering education policy since the Reform and Opening-up in the late 1970s has not been well documented in current English-language scholarship. Informed by historical and sociological studies of education, engineering and engine...

Engineering graduates encounter worlds of professional practice that are increasingly global in character. This new reality poses challenges for engineering educators and employers, who are faced with the formidable task of preparing engineers to be more effective in diverse national and cultural contexts. In response, many commentators have propos...

Scholars’ international mobility plays a key role in increasing the visibility of scholarly work and academic institutions in the current age of globalization. Previous work has demonstrated that national funding policies can have a significant and positive impact on a country’s global cooperation. The China Scholarship Council (CSC) is a governmen...

Prior research on engineering students’ understandings of ethics and social responsibility has produced mixed and sometimes conflicting results. Seeking greater clarity in this area of investigation, we conducted an exploratory, longitudinal study at four universities in the United States to better understand how engineering undergraduate students...

Scholars have argued that engineering practice should be understood in its societal context, including the political contexts in which engineers perform. However, very few research studies have systematically explored the political and moral backgrounds of engineering professionals, who would be the main agents in the political contexts. This paper...

Background Engineers operate in an increasingly global environment, making it important that engineering students develop global engineering competency to prepare them for success in the workplace. To understand this learning, we need assessment approaches that go beyond traditional self‐report surveys. A previous study (Jesiek et al., Journal of E...

Engineering education research (EER) has evolved as an interdisciplinary domain of scholarly inquiry in a number of countries, yet there are differences in how it is conceptualized, funded and enacted across these contexts. This chapter offers a comparative analysis of different trajectories of institutionalization of EER for three cases: Australia...

Engineering students’ views of ethics and social responsibility can be complex, multi-faceted, and influenced by participation in diverse experiences. To explore these influences, we surveyed engineering undergraduates at four U.S. universities to understand how their perceptions of ethics and social responsibility changed over time and whether cha...

Ethics and social responsibility are often viewed as key areas of concern for many engineering educators and professional engineers. Thus, it is important to consider how students and professionals understand and navigate ethical issues, explore how such perceptions and abilities change over time, and investigate if certain types of interventions a...

This paper reports on the results of three studies that take key steps toward developing and validating a survey instrument to assess the readiness of individuals who are about to sojourn abroad – the Sojourn Readiness Assessment (SRA). The first study presents the development of 20 items to measure three readiness dimensions (knowledge, motivation...

Informed by ABET accreditation criteria and broader societal needs, ethics has been emphasized as important for engineering professionals. Engineering students are thus exposed to professional ethics and related concerns throughout their college experiences both within and beyond the formal engineering curriculum, but little is known about what lea...

In this article we reflect on ethical issues arising amid our efforts over the past four years to set up a university-level engineering ethics center to facilitate faculty, staff, and student collaborations across disciplines. In this account we place considerable emphasis on relations with campus administration, including conflicts arising over th...

This editorial introduces this new issue of JIEE, featuring three papers that cover a wide variety of perspectives and topics. The first two papers originated in our late 2020 call for manuscripts addressing how the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted international engineering education. These papers once again underscore how the pandemic has spurred in...

This work-in-progress research paper reports on an ongoing research study which addresses two research questions: RQ1) What are the moral narratives of engineering practitioners across industry sectors? RQ2) How are the engineers' moral narratives influenced by the organizational cultures of their workplaces? As stories that support and sustain one...

The importance of ethics education for undergraduate engineering students has been emphasized due to the manifold impacts of engineering on society. However, little is known about moral disengagement among engineering students, which could potentially lead to unethical engineering practice. Especially, it is not known how engineering students’ mora...

The realities of engineering practice remain opaque and constantly evolving, often leaving graduates underprepared for the workplace and employers dissatisfied with new employees. In this study we shed new empirical light on the lived working experiences of early career engineers in large manufacturing firms. We adopt boundary spanning as the prima...

Current engineering ethics pedagogies are limited because they primarily focus on teaching reasoning skills. To promote the professional development of engineers beyond ethical reasoning, engineering educators need fundamental knowledge about engineers’ moral formation. To investigate engineers’ moral formation, the first author has begun a dissert...

While formal coursework remains one of the most common strategies for developing ethics knowledge and competence among engineering students, ethical situations also surface in many other settings. In our own research on engineering student perceptions of ethics and social responsibility, we found that many engineering interns and co-ops reported en...

The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted higher education in manifold and complex ways, not least in the area of international education. Programs built around the physical mobility of students, faculty, and staff were profoundly disrupted beginning in early 2020, necessitating the repatriation of students abroad, cancellation of future travel plans, and...

In light of both social and ABET expectations, engineering educators need to consider how to effectively infuse engineering ethics education into current engineering curricula. This article describes our initial efforts in that realm. We considered how to improve ethics education in engineering through establishing an academic-industry partnership,...

Engineers and other technical professionals are increasingly challenged by the impacts of globalization. Further, engineering educators, technical managers, and human resources staff have demonstrated great interest in selecting and training engineers who are capable of working competently, professionally, and ethically in global context. However,...

Background As globalization continues to impact the engineering profession, many programs aim to prepare current and future engineers to work across national and cultural boundaries. Yet there remains a lack of quality tools for assessing global competency among engineers and other technical professionals, including their behavioral tendencies in g...

Our NSF-supported Cultivating Cultures for Ethical STEM (CCE STEM) research project has been implementing a longitudinal, mixed-methods study with collaborators and research subjects from four U.S. engineering schools. To improve transferability of results, our study includes universities of different types in different geographic locales, includin...

Due to globalization trends, engineers are increasingly expected to work effectively across national and cultural boundaries. However, there remains a lack of valid and reliable measures of global engineering competency. To address this gap, the research team has undertaken a large-scale research project to develop a suite of instruments to measure...

Recent research in moral psychology suggests that people often rely on emotion and intuition to make moral judgments, rather than reasoning, which engineering ethics education has mainly focused on. In parallel with such findings, studies in the scholarship of engineering ethics have emphasized the importance of emotional capacities of engineers an...

Background: With communication skills deemed increasingly important for engineering graduates, we wanted to understand how writing is currently included in engineering classes, what challenges are caused by including writing in such classes, and what resources would be most useful to help engineering instructors more easily include writing in engin...

Writing has been identified as a critical skill and element of the engineering profession, yet it is rarely included in sophomore-level and junior-level courses. Textbooks often influence how courses are structured, and reading assignments and homework problems are frequently assigned directly from textbooks. In this project, textbooks are systemat...

In this Research Full Paper, we investigate moral disengagement among first-year engineering students. Current engineering ethics education typically assumes that providing information about what is ethical (i.e., as explicated in ethical codes) and developing ethical reasoning skills will lead to ethical behaviors in the classroom and on the job....

The complexity of design for development (D4D), humanitarian engineering (HE), and similar projects emerges from multiple sources, including the overarching requirement to address complex sociotechnical problems by effectively engaging community members. However, missing from the literature on enacting D4D/HE projects is a clear framework that clas...

Background Engineers are often expected to span organizational, cultural, stakeholder, geographic, temporal, and other boundaries. Yet, few studies on boundary spanning have appeared in the engineering education literature, suggesting the need for improved theoretical and conceptual foundations to guide empirical studies of boundary spanning in eng...

According to current ABET accreditation requirements, engineering students need to become aware of the social contexts of engineering and develop ethical and professional responsibilities during their undergraduate training. Concerns also persist about the moral and ethical commitments of engineers once they enter the workplace, as underscored by a...

Prior research has established emerging adulthood to be a time characterized by robust identity explorations in professional and non-professional domains. However, extant literature provides little contextual explanations in relation to how these identity explorations are experienced by early-career professionals. This manuscript presents idiograph...

To address complex sustainability challenges, solutions are needed that integrate the biophysical and sociocultural dimensions of sustainability. Engineers designing these solutions must be technically adept problem solvers, as well as effective at integrating the non-technical dimensions of sustainability into their design solutions. This paper re...

Humanitarian engineering (HE) is a very complex endeavour that requires addressing technical problems whilst concurrently engaging the community members who will ultimately benefit from the engineers’ solutions. Community participation is particularly important because it is directly linked to the sustainability of projects. Whilst many strategies...

This paper begins by reviewing dominant themes in current teaching of professional ethics in engineering education. In contrast to more traditional approaches that simulate ethical practice by using ethical theories to reason through micro-level ethical dilemmas, this paper proposes a pragmatic approach to ethics that places more emphasis on the pr...

Graduate school is most commonly viewed as the entryway and the main site for socialization in the academic career of a faculty member. While faculty positions can vary widely by institution type, most graduate students are prepared for future academic positions during time spent at doctoral universities with very high research activity. However, t...

Mixed methods study designs can improve understanding of many research questions in ways not possible with only qualitative or quantitative methods. Yet despite its potential advantages, mixed methods research carries challenges related to added time and resources, research skill requirements, and justification hurdles. In recent years, scholars ha...

In recent years, many universities have started working on development projects in developing and underdeveloped countries and have started to manage their own programs such as, EPICS. There are also several engineering organizations dedicated towards the needs in developed and developing countries such as, Engineering without Boarders, and Enginee...

A growing body of evidence suggests that practicing engineers are increasingly expected to act as boundary spanners who can participate in and manage diverse local and global teams, translate competing stakeholder demands into effective design solutions, and leverage expert knowledge from multiple fields and specialties. The larger project represen...

Engineers are increasingly acting as “boundary spanners” who coordinate, collaborate, and communicate across many different kinds of boundaries. The research project described in this work-in-progress paper is shedding additional light on this trend by responding to two main research questions: 1) What specific boundary spanning roles, activities,...

This special session invites academic researchers to temporarily adopt the commitments of interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) in order to gain insight into psychological experiences in engineering education research. In this session, we will introduce participants to IPA as a methodology that is committed to understanding the lived exper...

Many university-level electrical engineering courses continue to use textbooks as curriculum scaffolds, prescribed texts, and/or reference volumes. Textbook reliance is even more pronounced in courses that teach foundational principles of the discipline, such as introductory circuit theory. This paper reports on the conceptual coverage of introduct...

This paper details the transition of one researcher in his journey from attending to the methods of research to identifying and enacting the methodology of interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA). In the backdrop of this paper is a larger qualitative study that is employing IPA to understand a rich picture of how engineering student become e...

Sensitivity to cross-cultural and cross-national differences in engineering education and practice is essential for globally competent engineers. Those who fail to pay close attention to the historical-cultural contexts of engineering do so at their own peril, increasing the likelihood that their gaps in knowledge and misconceptions will lead to fa...

Writing has been identified as a critical skill and element of the engineering profession, yet it is rarely included in sophomore and junior level courses. Reflecting on our own prior efforts to develop writing assignments for such courses, we became curious about the extent to which the most popular engineering textbooks include writing prompts an...

The Cambridge Handbook of Engineering Education Research is the critical reference source for the growing field of engineering education research, featuring the work of world luminaries writing to define and inform this emerging field. The Handbook draws extensively on contemporary research in the learning sciences, examining how technology affects...

Small-scale power systems have considerable potential as sustainable and scalable sources of energy for developing countries. Recognizing this reality, a Global Design Team (GDT) from Purdue University has been working to develop a micro-hydropower solution with local technicians in Bangang, Cameroon. This paper recounts the five-year history of th...

Students in global service-learning and similar programs frequently encounter substantial social, cultural, political, and ethical differences when working with project partners in different countries and regions. Neglecting such differences can lead to project failures and/or disempowered communities. In response to these challenges, educational r...

In creating policies that support educating future engineers to meet both domestic needs and enable global mobility, a major strategy used by Chinese policymakers is “policy borrowing.” Yet one major challenge with this approach is that Chinese policymakers have not deeply reflected on the cultural differences between China and the countries from w...